he academy is in a cluttered, battered basement that also houses a karate school. But on this weeknight, surrounded by exercise equipment and drawings of martial arts fighters, six boys and four girls sat in a semicircle strumming guitars to the waltzy beat of a mariachi song.

The group belongs to the first class of the Mariachi Academy of New York, a one-year pilot project in East Harlem with 40 students, most from the neighborhood, known as the Puerto Rican barrio.

These English-speaking children of immigrants, some immigrants themselves, are injecting new blood into a centuries-old musical tradition from Mexico. They are part of the first stirrings of a mariachi culture in the land of salsa and merengue.

Of course, they have a way to go.

Characterized by acoustic harmonies and widely known lyrics about love and heroism usually played by a handsomely dressed, roving ensemble of men in sombreros, the rancheras and ballads of mariachi music can make the festive sing and the sad drink and weep. But at a music academy string class on a recent night, the studnts just made the teacher, Ramón Ponce Jr., wince.

"I think we went a little too fast," Jasmine Galindo, 9, said apologetically when the group of 9- to 11-year-olds broke into the first chords of "El Rey," a mariachi standard.

Mr. Ponce, artistic director of the academy and a member of a local mariachi group, Mariachi Real de México, founded by his father in the early 1990's, said the school was meant to foster mariachi music in a new generation, particularly the American-born children of Mexican immigrants.

He and his father, who moved to Queens from Puebla 15 years ago, took the idea for the school to the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in Manhattan, which opened it last summer with a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and some foundation money. The Union Settlement Association at Third Avenue and 98th Street donated a classroom.

Most of the students came to the academy without a musical background, but that was almost the point.

"Musically, they lean toward rap so, we don't want the Mexican music to die among them," Mr. Ponce said of the students. "Mexican music represents us in every corner of the world."

A mariachi school is a novelty on the East Coast but hardly surprising. Nostalgia and a rapidly growing Hispanic population, that is mostly of Mexican descent, is causing interest in the music across the United States, mariachi scholars say. In New York, the Mexican population leapfrogged over others in the 1990's to become the city's third-largest Latino group, after Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, the 2000 census showed.

In California, New Mexico and Texas, mariachi music is a staple at public events. But in New York there are so few mariachi musicians that some groups are trios rather than the typical 12 members. Two years ago, about a dozen mariachi groups in New York and New Jersey came together to lend one another members to handle a growing number of gigs at restaurants, public events and private parties, said Mr. Ponce, who makes his living as a mariachi musician.

There are other signs that the music is gaining a foothold in the city, from the hugely popular concerts of mariachi stars like Vicente Fernández at Madison Square Garden to the radio station WLXE-AM (1380) in New York, which switched from sports and news to Mexican music last year.

Now the Mariachi Academy of New York, where students through age15 take free instrument and voice lessons and learn to read music, holds the promise of producing homegrown musicians. Although the academy is a modest effort, historians in Mexico and the United States say, such schools are critical to the health of mariachi music, which is shunned by most radio stations and record companies as too folkloric.

In the United States, mariachi groups count on better technology to produce their sound and have tweaked the form to give it a decidedly American feel. Some groups sing in both Spanish and English, sometimes even singing "New York, New York" and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" They often include non-Mexicans, like the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians and Venezuelans who populate the mariachi groups in New York.

The bands here have more female performers than those in Mexico, where machismo is still very much part of the music's image. At the New York academy, about two-thirds of the students are girls.

"In Mexico there's still a stigma that mariachis are drunks, womanizers, uneducated," said Jonathan Clark, a mariachi musician who ran a mariachi workshop for many years at San Jose State University in California.

For a daughter to tell her parents she wants to be a mariachi, he said, "it's almost like wanting to be a prostitute."

But, Mr. Clark added, "The same family might move to the United States and approve of it because they see it as a way for their children not to lose their Mexican identity."

That is the case for most of the mothers and grandmothers who stood in the hall or sat in an adjacent room on a recent Thursday night as their children practiced the chords of mariachi standards like "Cielito Lindo" and "El Rey" on guitars and vihuelas, a mariachi signature string instrument.

Margarita Larios said that at first, she practically had to drag her grandson, Rafael Guzmán, 9, and her granddaughter, Margarita Guzmán, 15, to the academy. They are children of a Mexican mother and a Puerto Rican father. Margarita likes hip-hop, and Rafael likes Barney.

Now they are willing students of the guitar and the violin, Ms. Larios said, and the boy, who understood Spanish but did not speak it, at least sings it now.

"I like my traditions and customs, and I want them to know the Mexican culture," Ms. Larios said. "They're raised here in a Puerto Rican environment and know very little about Mexico."

It can take several years to hone the skills of budding mariachis, and the academy's first class has yet to separate into actual mariachi groups. But the whole class has already given a few public performances, to standing ovations from parents, and word of mouth has led to a waiting list of more than 100 adults and children for places in the school, said Cathy Ragland, the project's director at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.

Adult classes are to begin next month, she said, but a main goal of the nonprofit school is to get grants and private donations so it can continue beyond the pilot project, which will end in July. Mr. Ponce said efforts were also under way to stage an annual mariachi festival in New York.

Meanwhile, the Mexican influence is being felt in young New Yorkers like Jasmine and Ashley Galindo, Mexican-American sisters who grew up listening to their father's mariachi records. They said they were considering careers as police officers, doctors or mariachi singers.

But first, they have to do some explaining.

"My friends say, `What in the world is that?' " Ashley, 7, said of the reaction when she mentions her mariachi lessons. "I say, `That's Spanish music.' "